Reenacting Cook’s Voyages in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture

In this paper, I address themes of exchanges and temporalities through recourse to the practice of travel and the historical discourses around it, centered on a particular moment in the mid-nineteenth-century Pacific. I relate travel to the idea of reenactment, and the exchanges across time that this entails, by considering the visual culture of travel as a process of reenactment, as marking the significance of being in the Pacific at that time through the visual representation of the landscape. My discussion takes James Cook’s eighteenth-century Pacific voyages, to explore the way his ghost-like presence pervades the landscape of Tahiti for naval voyagers and draftsmen in the mid-1840s, at a particularly conflicted moment in the island’s history during the French takeover of it.